Musings on how presentation design will change the world.

Body of Work: Spring Projects

March marks the beginning of the creative leg of this year’s Body of Work development. I am working on creating assignments for the reboot of Professional Communication and Presentation online, designing the course calendar, and planning lessons. The launch is in April and I cannot wait!

In addition, I am working on a new deck that will debut in March. The subject of this deck is content development and is based on my content development series from 2013. Below is a preview of the deck. I am working on blending photography and iconography, and trying to find a balance between the two has been particularly rewarding. Creating consistency and unity when using two types of visual support can be a challenge, but using iconography from the Noun Project has helped me better represent ideas for which I cannot find photographs. I’ve also been creating my own icons for this project and drawing out ideas for icons I cannot find and must create.

Design elements; Network designed by Brennan Novak from The Noun Project, Brain designed by Linda Yuki Nakanishi from The Noun Project, Earth by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

In choosing a color scheme, I wanted to blend the calm productivity and creativity-generating blue with some vibrancy and positivity. To achieve that, I chose both orange and yellow-toned gold as my contrast color. Gold also represents wisdom and knowledge and the sharing of these ideas with others. In choosing typefaces for the project, I’d initially used District Pro Thin by Garage Fonts alone. But, since this is the only weight of that font available for use and it’s important for me to create some type contrast, I am balancing out the lightness and sleekness of District Pro Thin with Intro by FontFabric. I love the geometric simplicity and impact of this typeface. It looks particularly good with a small bit of text and a large image behind.

This is the current title slide; I’d love to keep working to find something with even more visual pop

This is my favorite slide so far. I am using it to represent that one idea that is a game changer in the creative process, the idea that can change the world.

Finally, in April, I plan on creating my first “slidedoc” using Nancy Duarte’s new infoproduct, Slidedocs. I created a course structure document to inform others of the changes PCP is undergoing. However, the document is extremely text-heavy and dense. Most readers are unsure what to look at first, which is of course not what I am going for. So, I am going to use the principles learned in Slidedocs to recreate the document in Keynote. I will then use this document to train instructors on how to teach the new PCP.